Abstract
How to determine the relative pose between the chaser spacecraft and the high-speed tumbling target spacecraft at close range, which is an essential step in space proximity missions, is very challenging. This paper proposes a LiDAR-based pose tracking method by fusing depth maps and point clouds. The key point is to estimate the roll angle variation in adjacent sensor data by using the line detection and matching in depth maps. The simplification of adaptive voxelized grid point cloud based on the real-time relative position is adapted in order to satisfy the real-time requirement in the approaching process. In addition, the Iterative Closest Point algorithm is used to align the simplified sparse point cloud with the known target model point cloud in order to obtain the relative pose. Numerical experiments, which simulate the typical tumbling motion of the target and the approaching process, are performed to demonstrate the method. The experimental results show that the method has capability of estimating the real-time 6-DOF relative pose and dealing with large pose variations.
Highlights
Pose estimation is one of the key technological challenges to enable relative navigation of a chaser spacecraft with respect to a target spacecraft
The proposed relative pose estimation method is described in detail
From the Experiment 1 and the Experiment 2, we can see that the proposed pose tracking method can effectively estimate the real-time 6-DOF relative pose while the tumbling motion of the non-cooperative target spacecraft exists
Summary
Pose estimation is one of the key technological challenges to enable relative navigation of a chaser spacecraft with respect to a target spacecraft. The capability of the chaser spacecraft to accurately estimate its relative pose is important to guidance, navigation and control technologies for autonomous proximity and rendezvous in orbit, especially in close-range proximity. The research on the relative pose determination of non-cooperative spacecraft is of great significance, which has become a hotspot and can be applied to many space missions like active debris removal, space manipulation, on-orbit servicing, etc. According to the specific mission scenario, a suitable pose determination technology includes the most suitable sensor and the effective pose estimating method. The key point of the pose method largely depends on the nature of the target spacecraft and the characteristic of the specific sensor type
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